In “The Super Mario Galaxy Movie,” we meet Yoshi, a cuddly green dinosaur in pink boots who looks like a plastic bath toy and will eat just about anything (he’s voiced in a babyish coo by Donald Glover). We also meet an army of Lumas, the icky-adorable iridescent stars in designer colors who are the cousins of Lumalee from “The Super Mario Bros. Movie” — but Lumalee had a funny Debbie Downer vibe, whereas the new ones are just generic glowstick mascots saying “Mama!” The mama they’re referring to is Princess Rosalina (Brie Larson), the adoptive mother of the Lumas (how did that happen? Why ask why?), who happens to be the sister of Princess Peach (Anya Taylor-Joy). In the opening scene, Rosalina is kidnapped by a giant shape-shifting droid that whisks her to outer space, where the entire movie takes place — and I mean that it really is set in space, since it never settles on a planet, or anywhere else, long enough to give you a satisfying sense of locale.
That droid is being controlled by Bowser Jr., who is like a tiny plushie version of his father — and who, as voiced by Benny Safdie, comes off as a kiddie Wallace Shawn pipsqueak tyrant. He’s got daddy issues, of course, but will resolve them, since Bowser (Jack Black) hasn’t gone away. He’s just very small (that happened when he got zapped at the end of the first film), and he’s now rather chastened, to the point that he actually becomes a friend of our heroes for a while and never even sings one song (that’s right — there is no sequel to “Peaches” in this movie). Then Bowser gets big again and reunites with his son, and the two agree to rule the universe together (or something), but somehow two Bowsers add up to less of a wowser than one.
I should mention that the film also includes the grouchy Toad (Keegan-Michael Key) and his fellow denizens of the Mushroom Kingdom, plus the Honey Queen (Issa Rae), who rules the Honeyhive galaxy, and Wart (Luis Guzmán), who might just as well be called the Frog King, as well as the artesanía-decorated residents of what appears to be a Mexican village in the red desert, plus a giant bee, Rob the Robot (who has a funny moment when he gets stuck on saying the letter “rrrrrrrrr….”), a full-on T. rex and a giant purple dragon, plus Fox McCloud (Glen Powell), a swaggering pilot who’s like Han Solo crossed with Rocket from the “Guardians of the Galaxy” films.
Did I mention that Mario (Chris Pratt) and Luigi (Charlie Day), those valiant mustached Brooklyn plumbers, are in “The Super Mario Galaxy Movie”? They most definitely are, though they often feel like an afterthought. They’re on their own disparate galaxy quest, trying to stop the Bowsers, and to help Princess Peach rescue her captive sister. She and Mario have a mutual crush thing going on, but that’s kind of an afterthought too, since the romance isn’t built into the movie’s storyline. Nothing is, really. Not a single one of these characters, including Mario and Luigi, occupies the center of “The Super Mario Galaxy Movie.” And that’s because the movie has no center.
The film keeps throwing things at you. It’s an orgy of video-game Easter eggs, but while that’s all clearly designed to appeal to young gamers, I don’t mean that the film replicates the experience of playing one of the Super Mario Bros. games. The first movie actually did — and managed, at the same time, to be a miraculously entertaining transmutational story for kids and adults alike. It was one of the best animated films in years.
“The Super Mario Galaxy Movie” is one of the worst. It has the same directors, Aaron Horvath and Michael Jelenic, and the same screenwriter, Matthew Fogel, but despite flashes of imagistic dazzle, it almost seems like these talented artists have been body-snatched. It feels like the Nintendo suits took over this time. “The Super Mario Galaxy Movie” is full of scenes of running, leaping, chasing, falling through the air, falling into lava, fighting and more fighting, but nothing in the movie is sustained. It’s a mad jumble, an eager product-tie-in mess. It’s one of the only animated features I’ve seen since the “Pokémon” films that seems to be wearing its Easter eggs on the outside.
“The Super Mario Bros. Movie” had a center, and a great one, in the presence of Bowser, who Jack Black played as a leering supervillain who was also a debauched romantic. The entire plot of the movie spun out of his love for Princess Peach, and Black’s vocal performance was a delectable weave of monomania and insecurity. I realize that the filmmakers didn’t just want to repeat what they did the first time. But they should have gone bigger. And the fact that Black never gets to sing a song is going to disappoint a galaxy’s worth of fans. Instead, the two Bowsers wind up seeming rather innocuous: just another double cog in the film’s machinery of eye candy in all directions.
“The Super Mario Galaxy Movie” is frenetic in such an impersonal way that it feels like the entire film should be put on Ritalin. Yet it may well be that as a commercial enterprise, this more-is-more Easter-egg hunt of a movie will clean up exactly as it’s designed to. The film treats its story as a threadbare adventure, a mere throwaway, because it’s so focused on those little pings of recognition for gamers. And that’s quite a comedown. After several decades of dreadful video-game films, “The Super Mario Bros. Movie” and, last year, “A Minecraft Movie” were proof positive that the big-screen adaptation of a game could be wild — and, in a phantasmagorical way, classical — fun. Let’s hope “The Super Mario Galaxy Movie” doesn’t herald a return to the days of video-game movies as spectacular and overstimulated chaos.
Source: variety.com
